They met when dance music was beginning to sound stale and injected it with a decade's worth of inventive vitality. They surfed through the category-ridden nineties as if the confining notion of genre was just an illusion. They transcended fashion by remaining true to an eclectic musical A-to-Z that opens with Africa Bambaataa and ends at the Zanzibar. And even though they've been collaborating for ten years, they're as prolific today as they've ever been.

'Little' Louie Vega and Kenny 'Dope' Gonzalez are New York's original Masters at Work. A unique urban species, they have listened to and absorbed the cross-cultural sound waves of Roy Ayres, John 'Jellybean' Benitez, George Benson, Jocelyn Brown, Chic, Celia Cruz, the Fania All Stars, Bruce Forest, Larry Heard, Loleatta Holloway, Tony Humphries, Jazzy Jay, Marshall Jefferson, Fela Kuti, Hector LaVoe, Larry Levan, David Mancuso, Eddie Palmieri, Tito Puente, Red Alert, the Salsoul Orchestra, Todd Terry and many more. Their record collections may have been hellish to organise, but by bringing these variegated pasts into an avant-gardist present Gonzalez and Vega have managed to negotiate the precarious sand dune of the dance music industry with such ease and originality that they must now be considered alongside the elite of contemporary dance music remixers.

The canon begins with Tom Moulton, the original remixer, whose work with B.T. Express, Al Downing, Gloria Gaynor, Patti Joe, MFSB and the South Shore Commission helped redefine the dance floor experience. Walter Gibbons — tiny, shy and ingenious — followed with a string of seminal reworkings that included Double Exposure and Loleatta Holloway. Jellybean, François Kevorkian, Larry Levan and Shep Pettibone dominated the eighties, with the powerful David Morales appearing as a key figure at the decade's close. And then, descending from the Puerto Rican quarters of Brooklyn and the Bronx, came Gonzalez and Vega, whose names will forever be associated with the nomadic nineties.

Vega's early years revolved around a series of events and relationships that compelled him to assume the role of musical alchemist. Born in June 1965, the Bronx baby grew up in an environment where Latin music was as common as bread and water. Vega's Puerto Rican father, Luis Vega, Sr., was an accomplished jazz and Latin sax player and Uncle Hector — Hector LaVoe, a singer with the legendary salsa ensemble the Fania All Stars — was a consistent inspiration. "Fania was ruling," recalls Vega, "and my uncle was at his prime in the seventies and early eighties."

At the same time the sound of the emerging New York underground was always within earshot thanks to two of Vega's older sisters, Myrna and Edna, who were regulars at David Mancuso's influential Loft parties, as well as derivatives such as the Gallery and the Paradise Garage. "They were heavy party girls," says Vega. "They loved the scene and they taught me about club music." Illicit recordings came to play an important role. "They'd come back with tapes. I started listening to all of these records and I was like, 'Wow! This music is great!'"

The multidimensional reality of the Loft, the Gallery and the Paradise Garage began to come into perspective in the mid to late seventies. "I would see my older sisters going out all night, driving my mother crazy," recalls Vega. "I used to go with people to drop them off and I would see the excitement in front of the club. They wanted to take me in because they knew I loved the music, but I was too young — plus I was really small for my age." Thus the prefix 'Little' that was attached to Louie Vega.

Seeking an alternative, Vega hooked into the local roller-disco scene in 1979. "That's when I first heard 'Good Times'," he remembers. "I was like, 'Forget it!' I was a heavy roller skater and it gave me a big feel for R&B." At the same time, Vega also immersed himself in local hip hop culture. "I used to live on Stratford Avenue and the Bronx River Projects were down the block," he says. "That's where Africa Bambaataa, Jazzy Jay and Red Alert used to throw jams. I loved the hip hop stuff." Then, in the early eighties, Vega started to go to the Funhouse, where he witnessed Madonna snuggling up to Jellybean as the DJ juxtaposed the likes of Freeez, Rocker's Revenge, Shannon and the Soul Sonic Force.

Yet none of these musical environments quite compared to the awesome experience of Michael Brody's cavernous club on King Street. "I first went to the Paradise Garage in 1980," says Vega. "My sisters worked me in and I was totally blown away. I just stood there with my mouth open, watching Larry go off." Levan's sense of adventure knew no boundaries. "I loved Larry because he wasn't afraid to play different kinds of things. He would be in a groove and before you knew it you'd be dancing to Pat Benatar's 'Love Is a Battlefield' or Sting's 'If You Love Somebody Set Them Free'. Larry was a big influence."

With role models coming out of his ears, Vega honed his "style and flavour" alongside a mobile jock called Raul Socia before joining forces with DJ-promoter John Rivera, with whom he organised a series of one-off neighbourhood parties for crowds of up to seven hundred. "Myrna had a hairdressing salon and we used her place to give out flyers and sell tickets," says Vega. "My sisters would always come along with their friends, so I learnt to mix the tracks that the young people liked with the music that the older, Garage heads liked."

In 1984 Vega began his first club residency at Chez Sensual on Zerega Avenue in the Bronx, and by the following April he had been lured into a larger venue called the Devil's Nest. "It was packed as soon as we opened up because I already had a crowd," he remembers. "I played all different flavours. I played freestyle, Latin hip hop and Garage-flavoured stuff. I even played dance-oriented rock such as U2 'Pride' and the Smiths 'How Soon Is Now?'"

'Running' by Information Society was another favourite, and when Tommy Boy executive Joey Gardner witnessed the diminutive DJ caning the track he asked him to do a remix. The fact that this was a freestyle project was no coincidence. Along with Jellybean, Vega had been credited with introducing the genre to a wider market, and the young Bronx upstart had even managed to establish himself as a Jellybean protégé. "I'd started to work for Eddie Rivera's record pool and that's where I met Jellybean," he recalls. "I spent a lot of time with him in the studio and he let me do some edits." All of which was good preparation for 'Running'. "I knew what I wanted. I didn't do any overdubs. It was more bringing up stuff in the mix. I just enhanced what was there."

At the same time, Leslie Doyle of A&M introduced Vega to the black gay club (Better Days) where her straight white boyfriend (Bruce Forest) was mixing up a storm. "I was like, 'Damn! This boy is bad!'" says Vega. "Eventually Bruce took me under his wing." Never more so than when the Better Days mixmaster, along with Kiss FM DJ/Salsoul remixer Shep Pettibone, hired Vega to work in their new club, Heartthrob, which they had opened —with the backing of Better Days owner Dave Fisher — on the site of the now defunct Funhouse. "We hired Junior Vasquez to play," says Forest. "He did all of these house dubs and people hated it. The Funhouse was the ultimate Latin hip hop palace in the mid-eighties and the crowd still wanted Latin. I had to fire Junior. He was a friend of mine and it wasn't fun."

Cue Vega. "I had heard of this young Latino guy at the Devil's Nest and I went to hear him," says Forest. "I said, 'This guy's smokin'! Let's get him!' He was competent. He was inventive. He was playing to the crowd rather than to himself. I thought he was brilliant." Initially Vega played Heartthrob on Fridays and the Devil's Nest on Saturdays, but before long he was invited to play both nights at the new venue. "My Bronx crowd was dying for me to go to Manhattan," explains Vega. "As soon as I started playing in Heartthrob there was a line around the block."

But if they were queuing for freestyle then they were in for a surprise. "I went more into house at Heartthrob," acknowledges Vega. "We hired Larry Heard, Robert Owens, Marshall Jefferson and Liz Torres to perform. I was known for freestyle, but when the house stuff started coming in, I loved it." The DJ saw the new sound as continuous with the music he had grown up with. "It was like classics with harder beats. It was a little more repetitious and raw, but it had a feeling to it, and there were songs that meant something."

At the same time, Vega never descended into a homogeneous house sound. "I was playing freestyle, hip hop, classics. I'd jam up the house records and then all of a sudden I'd break it up with something else. I'd be thinking, 'How you all feel out there? You all ready for this?' And then whhhp! I'd bring in a different flavour." A futuristic siren drawn from a German sound effects record provided Vega with a signature transition track. "If a record was breaking and the beat came in strong then I'd put that siren over it and the crowd would just go crazy. It became my trademark. I got a lot of DJs looking for that siren."

It was into this exciting and transitional environment that a young, would-be producer walked up to Vega and handed him a cassette. "This guy came up to the booth and said, 'My name is Todd Terry. I just wanted to give you these new jams.'" The night was drawing to a close, so Vega had a quick listen to the track that was about to turn Terry into New York's hottest house producer. "I was like, 'Wow! This is powerful!'" With its quick-fire sampling techniques and harder beats, 'Party People' introduced an edgy, hip hop aesthetic to the Chicago house sound, and Vega wasted little time in securing a reel-to-reel copy. "There was an instant reaction on the dance floor," he remembers. "I was playing 'Party People' six to nine months before it came out, so I got everybody into that sound."

While Levan was something of a late convert to house, he remained a commanding figure for Vega, who would regularly head down to the Paradise Garage when Heartthrob closed at five-a.m., and in 1986 the ubiquitous Jellybean introduced the two DJs to each other. "I'd stand in the booth and watch him work the crowd," says Vega. "He probably saw me as a young kid out there playing." If he did then he had changed his mind by the summer of 1987. "Larry said, 'I'd love for you to do a guest spot,'" remembers Vega, who suddenly found himself on the verge of joining an exclusive coterie that included David Depino, François Kevorkian, Danny Krivit, Joey Llanos, David Morales, Larry Patterson, Victor Rosado and Tee Scott. "He told me at the Garage. I couldn't believe it."

By the end of the year the Little Prince was playing in the same booth as the King of the Night — but not at the Garage, which had shut up shop when its ten-year lease expired in September 1987, and not at Heartthrob, which closed in the same period. "Heartthrob came to an end when an aggressive owner reopened Studio 54 for a younger clientele," explains Vega, who was immediately headhunted to play at the infamous West Fifty-fourth Street venue. "My crowd from Heartthrob followed me there. I was playing freestyle, hip hop, reggae, classics and more and more house. Friday nights there would be twenty-five hundred and Saturday nights four thousand." The vacant Thursday night slot was filled by Levan. "Larry needed a new home. He was doing different spots here and there. His Studio night was packed. The Garage crowd came out to support him."

The following year Vega's recording alter ego caught up with his DJing persona when, having worked on over a hundred freestyle records, he produced his first house track — 'Take Me Away' by 2 in a Room on Aldo Marin's Cutting Records. "I sampled Loleatta Holloway's 'Love Sensation'," says Vega. "It was a simple track that people could recognise. Junior Vasquez liked it and did a mix." Another, unrelated Vasquez — Richard, who had temporarily taken over the Third Street Loft when David Mancuso went on a sabbatical — gave heavy rotation to Vega's next house concoction, 'Don't Tell Me' by the Freestyle Orchestra, which included a hook from 'How to Be a Millionaire' by ABC and First Choice's 'Dr Love'. Then, after a series of mixes and arrangements for Terry, Vega cooked up his first genuine underground house hit — 'Got to Keep On Pumpin It Up' by the Freestyle Orchestra featuring D'borah on SBK in 1990. "Tony Humphries played it a lot at the Zanzibar and I asked him to do a remix on the B-side of the record," says Vega. "That was my first big house record."

Louie's choice track, however, was 'Salsa House', a Nu Groove release that combined a sample from Celia Cruz's 'Kimbarra' with a fragment from 'I Need You' by Sylvester. "It had this nice Latin house groove," says Vega, "and all of a sudden it went into these great R&B disco changes. I really liked the song, but I also wanted this one part to run longer." The prospect of doing a remix became a real possibility thanks to Terry. "I told Todd that They met when dance music was beginning to sound stale and injected it with a decade's worth of inventive vitality. They surfed through the category-ridden nineties as if the confining notion of genre was just an illusion. They transcended fashion by remaining true to an eclectic musical A-to-Z that opens with Africa Bambaataa and ends at the Zanzibar. And even though they've been collaborating for ten years, they're as prolific today as they've ever been.

'Little' Louie Vega and Kenny 'Dope' Gonzalez are New York's original Masters at Work. A unique urban species, they have listened to and absorbed the cross-cultural sound waves of Roy Ayres, John 'Jellybean' Benitez, George Benson, Jocelyn Brown, Chic, Celia Cruz, the Fania All Stars, Bruce Forest, Larry Heard, Loleatta Holloway, Tony Humphries, Jazzy Jay, Marshall Jefferson, Fela Kuti, Hector LaVoe, Larry Levan, David Mancuso, Eddie Palmieri, Tito Puente, Red Alert, the Salsoul Orchestra, Todd Terry and many more. Their record collections may have been hellish to organise, but by bringing these variegated pasts into an avant-gardist present Gonzalez and Vega have managed to negotiate the precarious sand dune of the dance music industry with such ease and originality that they must now be considered alongside the elite of contemporary dance music remixers.

The canon begins with Tom Moulton, the original remixer, whose work with B.T. Express, Al Downing, Gloria Gaynor, Patti Joe, MFSB and the South Shore Commission helped redefine the dance floor experience. Walter Gibbons — tiny, shy and ingenious — followed with a string of seminal reworkings that included Double Exposure and Loleatta Holloway. Jellybean, François Kevorkian, Larry Levan and Shep Pettibone dominated the eighties, with the powerful David Morales appearing as a key figure at the decade's close. And then, descending from the Puerto Rican quarters of Brooklyn and the Bronx, came Gonzalez and Vega, whose names will forever be associated with the nomadic nineties.

Vega's early years revolved around a series of events and relationships that compelled him to assume the role of musical alchemist. Born in June 1965, the Bronx baby grew up in an environment where Latin music was as common as bread and water. Vega's Puerto Rican father, Luis Vega, Sr., was an accomplished jazz and Latin sax player and Uncle Hector — Hector LaVoe, a singer with the legendary salsa ensemble the Fania All Stars — was a consistent inspiration. "Fania was ruling," recalls Vega, "and my uncle was at his prime in the seventies and early eighties."

At the same time the sound of the emerging New York underground was always within earshot thanks to two of Vega's older sisters, Myrna and Edna, who were regulars at David Mancuso's influential Loft parties, as well as derivatives such as the Gallery and the Paradise Garage. "They were heavy party girls," says Vega. "They loved the scene and they taught me about club music." Illicit recordings came to play an important role. "They'd come back with tapes. I started listening to all of these records and I was like, 'Wow! This music is great!'"

The multidimensional reality of the Loft, the Gallery and the Paradise Garage began to come into perspective in the mid to late seventies. "I would see my older sisters going out all night, driving my mother crazy," recalls Vega. "I used to go with people to drop them off and I would see the excitement in front of the club. They wanted to take me in because they knew I loved the music, but I was too young — plus I was really small for my age." Thus the prefix 'Little' that was attached to Louie Vega.

Seeking an alternative, Vega hooked into the local roller-disco scene in 1979. "That's when I first heard 'Good Times'," he remembers. "I was like, 'Forget it!' I was a heavy roller skater and it gave me a big feel for R&B." At the same time, Vega also immersed himself in local hip hop culture. "I used to live on Stratford Avenue and the Bronx River Projects were down the block," he says. "That's where Africa Bambaataa, Jazzy Jay and Red Alert used to throw jams. I loved the hip hop stuff." Then, in the early eighties, Vega started to go to the Funhouse, where he witnessed Madonna snuggling up to Jellybean as the DJ juxtaposed the likes of Freeez, Rocker's Revenge, Shannon and the Soul Sonic Force.

Yet none of these musical environments quite compared to the awesome experience of Michael Brody's cavernous club on King Street. "I first went to the Paradise Garage in 1980," says Vega. "My sisters worked me in and I was totally blown away. I just stood there with my mouth open, watching Larry go off." Levan's sense of adventure knew no boundaries. "I loved Larry because he wasn't afraid to play different kinds of things. He would be in a groove and before you knew it you'd be dancing to Pat Benatar's 'Love Is a Battlefield' or Sting's 'If You Love Somebody Set Them Free'. Larry was a big influence."

With role models coming out of his ears, Vega honed his "style and flavour" alongside a mobile jock called Raul Socia before joining forces with DJ-promoter John Rivera, with whom he organised a series of one-off neighbourhood parties for crowds of up to seven hundred. "Myrna had a hairdressing salon and we used her place to give out flyers and sell tickets," says Vega. "My sisters would always come along with their friends, so I learnt to mix the tracks that the young people liked with the music that the older, Garage heads liked."

In 1984 Vega began his first club residency at Chez Sensual on Zerega Avenue in the Bronx, and by the following April he had been lured into a larger venue called the Devil's Nest. "It was packed as soon as we opened up because I already had a crowd," he remembers. "I played all different flavours. I played freestyle, Latin hip hop and Garage-flavoured stuff. I even played dance-oriented rock such as U2 'Pride' and the Smiths 'How Soon Is Now?'"

'Running' by Information Society was another favourite, and when Tommy Boy executive Joey Gardner witnessed the diminutive DJ caning the track he asked him to do a remix. The fact that this was a freestyle project was no coincidence. Along with Jellybean, Vega had been credited with introducing the genre to a wider market, and the young Bronx upstart had even managed to establish himself as a Jellybean protégé. "I'd started to work for Eddie Rivera's record pool and that's where I met Jellybean," he recalls. "I spent a lot of time with him in the studio and he let me do some edits." All of which was good preparation for 'Running'. "I knew what I wanted. I didn't do any overdubs. It was more bringing up stuff in the mix. I just enhanced what was there."

At the same time, Leslie Doyle of A&M introduced Vega to the black gay club (Better Days) where her straight white boyfriend (Bruce Forest) was mixing up a storm. "I was like, 'Damn! This boy is bad!'" says Vega. "Eventually Bruce took me under his wing." Never more so than when the Better Days mixmaster, along with Kiss FM DJ/Salsoul remixer Shep Pettibone, hired Vega to work in their new club, Heartthrob, which they had opened —with the backing of Better Days owner Dave Fisher — on the site of the now defunct Funhouse. "We hired Junior Vasquez to play," says Forest. "He did all of these house dubs and people hated it. The Funhouse was the ultimate Latin hip hop palace in the mid-eighties and the crowd still wanted Latin. I had to fire Junior. He was a friend of mine and it wasn't fun."

Cue Vega. "I had heard of this young Latino guy at the Devil's Nest and I went to hear him," says Forest. "I said, 'This guy's smokin'! Let's get him!' He was competent. He was inventive. He was playing to the crowd rather than to himself. I thought he was brilliant." Initially Vega played Heartthrob on Fridays and the Devil's Nest on Saturdays, but before long he was invited to play both nights at the new venue. "My Bronx crowd was dying for me to go to Manhattan," explains Vega. "As soon as I started playing in Heartthrob there was a line around the block."

But if they were queuing for freestyle then they were in for a surprise. "I went more into house at Heartthrob," acknowledges Vega. "We hired Larry Heard, Robert Owens, Marshall Jefferson and Liz Torres to perform. I was known for freestyle, but when the house stuff started coming in, I loved it." The DJ saw the new sound as continuous with the music he had grown up with. "It was like classics with harder beats. It was a little more repetitious and raw, but it had a feeling to it, and there were songs that meant something."

At the same time, Vega never descended into a homogeneous house sound. "I was playing freestyle, hip hop, classics. I'd jam up the house records and then all of a sudden I'd break it up with something else. I'd be thinking, 'How you all feel out there? You all ready for this?' And then whhhp! I'd bring in a different flavour." A futuristic siren drawn from a German sound effects record provided Vega with a signature transition track. "If a record was breaking and the beat came in strong then I'd put that siren over it and the crowd would just go crazy. It became my trademark. I got a lot of DJs looking for that siren."

It was into this exciting and transitional environment that a young, would-be producer walked up to Vega and handed him a cassette. "This guy came up to the booth and said, 'My name is Todd Terry. I just wanted to give you these new jams.'" The night was drawing to a close, so Vega had a quick listen to the track that was about to turn Terry into New York's hottest house producer. "I was like, 'Wow! This is powerful!'" With its quick-fire sampling techniques and harder beats, 'Party People' introduced an edgy, hip hop aesthetic to the Chicago house sound, and Vega wasted little time in securing a reel-to-reel copy. "There was an instant reaction on the dance floor," he remembers. "I was playing 'Party People' six to nine months before it came out, so I got everybody into that sound."

While Levan was something of a late convert to house, he remained a commanding figure for Vega, who would regularly head down to the Paradise Garage when Heartthrob closed at five-a.m., and in 1986 the ubiquitous Jellybean introduced the two DJs to each other. "I'd stand in the booth and watch him work the crowd," says Vega. "He probably saw me as a young kid out there playing." If he did then he had changed his mind by the summer of 1987. "Larry said, 'I'd love for you to do a guest spot,'" remembers Vega, who suddenly found himself on the verge of joining an exclusive coterie that included David Depino, François Kevorkian, Danny Krivit, Joey Llanos, David Morales, Larry Patterson, Victor Rosado and Tee Scott. "He told me at the Garage. I couldn't believe it."

By the end of the year the Little Prince was playing in the same booth as the King of the Night — but not at the Garage, which had shut up shop when its ten-year lease expired in September 1987, and not at Heartthrob, which closed in the same period. "Heartthrob came to an end when an aggressive owner reopened Studio 54 for a younger clientele," explains Vega, who was immediately headhunted to play at the infamous West Fifty-fourth Street venue. "My crowd from Heartthrob followed me there. I was playing freestyle, hip hop, reggae, classics and more and more house. Friday nights there would be twenty-five hundred and Saturday nights four thousand." The vacant Thursday night slot was filled by Levan. "Larry needed a new home. He was doing different spots here and there. His Studio night was packed. The Garage crowd came out to support him."

The following year Vega's recording alter ego caught up with his DJing persona when, having worked on over a hundred freestyle records, he produced his first house track — 'Take Me Away' by 2 in a Room on Aldo Marin's Cutting Records. "I sampled Loleatta Holloway's 'Love Sensation'," says Vega. "It was a simple track that people could recognise. Junior Vasquez liked it and did a mix." Another, unrelated Vasquez — Richard, who had temporarily taken over the Third Street Loft when David Mancuso went on a sabbatical — gave heavy rotation to Vega's next house concoction, 'Don't Tell Me' by the Freestyle Orchestra, which included a hook from 'How to Be a Millionaire' by ABC and First Choice's 'Dr Love'. Then, after a series of mixes and arrangements for Terry, Vega cooked up his first genuine underground house hit — 'Got to Keep On Pumpin It Up' by the Freestyle Orchestra featuring D'borah on SBK in 1990. "Tony Humphries played it a lot at the Zanzibar and I asked him to do a remix on the B-side of the record," says Vega. "That was my first big house record."

Louie's choice track, however, was 'Salsa House', a Nu Groove release that combined a sample from Celia Cruz's 'Kimbarra' with a fragment from 'I Need You' by Sylvester. "It had this nice Latin house groove," says Vega, "and all of a sudden it went into these great R&B disco changes. I really liked the song, but I also wanted this one part to run longer." The prospect of doing a remix became a real possibility thanks to Terry. "I told Todd that I liked the track and he said, 'Hey, I know the guy who made it. I'll introduce you to him.'" The "guy who made it" was Kenny 'Dope' Gonzalez, who had actually spent more than half of his life cursing the likes of Cruz. "I wasn't into Latin at all," says Gonzalez, who was born in 1970 and grew up in Brooklyn's Sunset Park. "My parents were playing Eddie Palmieri, Blades and the Fania All Stars all the time, so I didn't really want to hear that stuff. I didn't like it and I didn't understand it." By the early eighties the would-be Brooklyn B-boy had discovered an alternative rhythm in the local street parties. "That was my first experience of hip hop," says Gonzalez. "I was basically a thirteen-year-old kid sneaking out of the house and watching these DJs working these records. That's where I started to learn about breaks and beats."

In 1985 Gonzalez started doing some part-time work at his local record store, WNR Music Centre. "That's really where it all started," he remembers. "It was an all-round store. There was rock, dance music, freestyle, soul and hip hop. I ended up becoming a buyer, so I was bringing in music for all of these different types of people. That's when I first got into house — the material from Trax and DJ International. Mr Fingers and Marshal Jefferson were selling like crazy." The owner of the record store also became a major influence. "He was a rock 'n' roll head," says Gonzalez, who started to work full-time in 1988. "He turned me onto Led Zeppelin and all of that kind of stuff. That's when I started learning about rock breaks."

Around the same time Gonzalez, along with his partner Mike Delgado, stepped into the DJing arena, organising neighbourhood parties under the pseudonym Masters at Work. "There were two halls that we used to rent," says Gonzalez. "One was on top of a Tom McAn shoe store that would hold two hundred people, and the other was called Widdi Catering that could hold about four hundred people." The Masters at Work gigs became the site of Gonzalez's introduction to Brooklyn's latest local hero. "Todd came along because he was friendly with Mike," explains Gonzalez. "Mike used to edit records for Todd and I used to be around all of that stuff, so I learnt about the structure of a song." When Terry asked if he could use the Masters at Work alias for two new releases — 'Alright, Alright' and 'Dum Dum Cry' on Fourth Floor — Gonzalez was only too happy to help out his new friend. "I was like, 'Go ahead. Use it.'"

Terry — who was still in regular touch with Vega and had used the DJ's favourite siren sample in his dance floor classic, 'Can You Party' by Royal House — gave Gonzalez a crucial helping hand when it came to making records. "I borrowed drum machines from Todd and began to experiment," he says. "In 1989 I really started making beats." His first four releases — rhythm tracks recorded under the Powerhouse alias - all appeared on Frank Mendez's cutting edge Nu Groove label. "I said, 'No advance!'" remembers Gonzalez. "It was a small label and I just wanted my records out there. Frank gave me my first break. He bought me my first sampler and he gave me royalties later on. I'm really grateful to him for that."

Gonzalez's Nu Groove work culminated with 'Salsa House' — and heavy rotation from DJ 'Little' Louie Vega. "Louie wanted to remix the record," says Gonzalez. "He knew Todd and he was like, 'Who's the kid?' Todd told him I was from the neighbourhood and Louie was supposed to ring me. He never called and so I got his number from Todd. I was bugging out because he was the big guy at the time and I was just this little kid from Brooklyn. I ended up going down to the Bronx and we met at his house." In the end the 'Salsa House' remix never happened. But that was only because there was too much other work to do.

The Work

When Joey Carvello, acting on Jellybean's tip-off, asked Louie Vega to come up with an album concept for Atlantic, the DJ-producer-remixer acted on his collaborative instincts and created a powerful Latin-oriented team. Marc Anthony, a club kid from the Heartthrob era who was "the unsigned act on the freestyle scene", was invited to work as the lead vocalist and co-artist. Long-time partner India, along with Derek Whitaker, was brought in to co-write the songs as well as perform backing vocals. And Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri were hired following a gentle nudge from the unsung hero of the project, manager David Maldonado, who had previously worked with Hector LaVoe. "David knew everybody from the scene," says Vega. "He was the one who used to tell me, 'Look, man, you should bring these Latin legends into your music! They're your roots and it'd be a great marriage!' He's a mentor figure who always came up with different ideas."

Then there was the new kid, Kenny 'Dope' Gonzalez, who Vega regarded as a potential long-term partner. "Kenny was young and I saw something special in him," he explains. "I had the vision of working with him as a team and so I brought him into the studio for the Marc Anthony album and got him used to matching beats to different songs." Vega was drawn to Gonzalez's rhythmic flair — even though he was more than capable of laying down his own beats. "Louie did 'Take Me Away' and it was hot," reasons Gonzalez. "I guess he was looking for a way to spend more time with the keyboards." The transition, however, needed to be a gentle one. "It was my first time in a big studio," Gonzalez remembers. "I was kind of scared and I held back. Louie did everything he could to make me feel comfortable."

Everything came together on the tenth track of the album, in which Palmieri and Puente, egged on by Anthony, jammed over a series of Gonzalez beats (one of four cuts that the twenty-year-old worked on). "We called it 'Masters at Work Featuring Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri'," says Vega. "It was the first time we used the name on one of our productions, although in this case the masters in question were Tito and Eddie."

As acetates of the album began to seep through the bloodstream of New York's nightworld, Carvello asked Gonzalez and Vega to reconstruct Debbie Gibson's 'One Step Ahead'. Vega had already worked with Gibson, remixing 'Only in My Dreams' and 'Out of the Blue', but now he had a new agenda. "Louie was coming out of the freestyle era and he didn't get respect from the more underground DJs in New York," says a still-incredulous Gonzalez. "They considered freestyle music to be too commercial and that made Louie a bubble gum DJ. Apart from Larry Levan, who showed him a lot of love, I don't think they understood where he was coming from or what he was capable of doing. He had a point to prove. And I had a point to prove because I was just starting."

The duo decided to redeploy an old name in order to forge a new identity. "'One Step Ahead' was our first Masters at Work track," remembers Vega. "We said, 'Let's make a dub on the B-side so we can start creating a vibe out there.'" That vibe began when Vega sent a reel of the dub to one of New York's most respected DJs. "Frankie Knuckles was playing at the Sound Factory and he loved it. He was playing this reel all the time. It became a big underground record. The Debbie Gibson gave us our notoriety."

More Atlantic commissions — and special Masters at Work dubs — ensued. 'Hip Hop' by Chris Cuevas was given extensive play by Kiss FM/Zanzibar guru Tony Humphries, and 'You Should Know by Now' by Chrissy I-eece became the first collaboration between MAW and Todd Terry. But the next major noise was created by Gonzalez and Vega's first Masters at Work production, a Cutting Record twelve-inch that included 'Blood Vibes', a murky, low-frequency concept that combined the harsh beats of hip hop with the bottom heavy bass of reggae, and 'The Ha Dance', a ferocious, insurgent recording that merged powerful house beats with a series of terrifying samples — exactly what you'd expect from the Gonzalez-Vega combination, except that it was the street-oriented Gonzalez who came up with the house and the club-friendly Vega who devised the hip hop. "'The Ha Dance' was big in the clubs and became a vogueing anthem," recalls Vega, who was playing the tracks on reel-to-reel at a club called Roseland while the Atlantic album was still being recorded. "'Blood Vibes' was big with hip hop DJs like Red Alert."

MAW expanded their already significant repertoire with the release of 'Our Mute Horns', a jazz-inflected deep house groove that featured Ray Vega's trumpet and Marc Anthony's background vocals. "I was developing relationships with musicians in the Latin scene and Ray had played with Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri," says Vega (who isn't related to the trumpeter). "We always loved the muted horn sound and we dedicated the record to Miles Davis." Appearing around the same as Danny Tenaglia's classic 'Harmonica Track', which sampled an anonymous twenty-year-old harmonica solo, 'Our Mute Horns' showed that house producers could work alongside professional jazz musicians — and that each party could bring a new relevance to the other's music. "We had the track laid down and Ray played on top of it," says Vega. "He thought the house track was interesting and ever since then we've been jazzing up the house."

A Leslie Doyle commission to remix Tito Puente's 'Ran Kan Kan', which had featured in the Mambo Kings movie, enabled Gonzalez and Vega to take their experimental work with session musicians into a Latin framework. "When I heard Tony Humphries play 'Ride on the Rhythm' at the Zanzibar it blew my mind," says Doyle, who had moved on to Elektra. "I hadn't thought much of Louie when he was a freestyle DJ, but after the Marc Anthony album I hired Masters at Work to remix the Tito Puente. I thought they were something else: new, fresh, hard and original."

Gonzalez and Vega rearranged the vocal and horns around a new track and invited Puente to add an extra layer of timbales. The result was a percussive, chant-heavy monument to contemporary cross-cultural pollination, and Larry Levan, who had developed a fierce commitment to hybridity in the mixed environment of David Mancuso's parties, wasted little time in declaring his admiration. "He came up to me while I was preparing to do a guest spot at Richard Vasquez's Loft," says Vega. "He said, 'You're the only person in this industry who could have made that record happen.' He didn't know Kenny, but he understood that we had made a house record out of this 1951 mambo song and that it worked."

Keen to tap into MAW's innovative sound, Warner started to pass work onto Gonzalez and Vega, and the remix of Saint Etienne's 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart' became their biggest underground hit to date. "The Saint Etienne was bigger than Debbie Gibson," says Vega. "With that track we really developed what Todd Terry had done with house. We combined sampled sounds with something a little more musical, and Kenny developed this swinging syncopated beat that felt like it was four-on-the-floor but was also something else."

The beat was literally something else. "I never used the same sound twice," says Gonzalez, who, in contrast to so many of his contemporary rhythm generators, refused to work with the stock house beat produced by the Roland 909. "I would filter out certain parts of the beat to make a different sound. I used four or five different kick drums in different frequencies to get what I wanted. It was a lot of work, but it enabled me to capture the feel of two drummers playing at the same time and feeding off each other." The Saint Etienne was the first time Gonzalez brought this trick into a Masters at Work release. "It was on a whole different wavelength and it took people two or three years to figure out those beats, by which time I had moved somewhere else."

By the end of 1991 Gonzalez and Vega were being trumpeted as the 'next big thing' — and for once this couldn't be dismissed as yawn-inducing journalistic hype. While other, similarly lauded acts proceeded to evaporate as quickly as dry ice on a crowded dance floor, MAW continued to enhance their reputation in 1992, working on a series of high-profile projects that included 'Wishing on a Star' by the Cover Girls, 'Runaway' by Deee-Lite, 'Gonna Get Back to You' by MAW & Company featuring Xavier Gold, 'Photograph of Mary' by Trey Lorenz, 'Carry On' by Martha Wash and 'Work to Do' by Vanessa Williams. For underground diehards, however, the highlight of the year came with the production of 'Comin' On Strong' by Desiya on Elektra, another Doyle commission that brought together the mixing skills of Masters at Work, Todd Terry and Tony Humphries. "Junior Vasquez was playing it, Frankie Knuckles was playing it, everybody was playing it," says Vega. "That's how the Magic Session in Miami started. Leslie arranged for the four of us to play together and it's become a religious thing."

Miami reintroduced Vega to his beloved wheels of steel — the DJ having taken a leave of absence from the club circuit for some eighteen months. "I wanted to stop playing in the freestyle clubs," he explains, "so I took a little time off." Then, in the spring of 1992, Don Welch and Barbara Tucker invited him to become the resident DJ at the Sound Factory Bar. "Don and Barbara were running these Wednesday night Underground Network parties at a club called Savage," remembers Vega. "Don had invited me to do a guest spot because he loved the records I was making. It went well, I did a couple more, and when they moved to the Sound Factory Bar they asked if I would become the resident."

The parties got off to a slow start, but when it became clear that the Underground Network was offering, along with the soon-to-close Shelter, a window into the fading world of the Paradise Garage, the dancers began to flock in. "The Sound Factory Bar was a big turning point for me because I finally had a home where I could create a whole scene," says Vega. "It was the same vision that Larry had. The music didn't have a colour and if it was good I played it. The crowd became very multicultural, very open to different sounds. I'd play a Tribe Called Quest record, I'd play a Latin record, a rare classic, house, whatever.

As planned, the Sound Factory Bar successfully established itself as an industry night — Vega having proposed that the Underground Network should bring together DJs, dancers, singers and record label people with the regular crowd — and it was into this record-swapping environment that Gladys Pizarro, A&R executive at the hot new dance label Strictly Rhythm, started to hand Vega her latest releases. "The most influential club for me was the Sound Factory bar," says Pizarro. "Louie was my hero! I followed Louie throughout. He was like, 'Get away from me already!'"

Eventually a combination of talent, persistence and charm enabled Pizarro to persuade Vega to follow Gonzalez, who had already recorded for Strictly under his Untouchables alias (largely because the money was so much better than it had been at Nu Groove). The result was 'Sindae' by Hardrive featuring LG, a groovy dub that featured a rap artist who had been uncovered by Lem Springsteen and John Ciafone (the future Mood II Swing). Hardrive was so successful that the four producers reconvened to work on 'Helpless' by Urbanised featuring Silvano, which went on to become one of the year's underground anthems. "It was sung by this kid who came from the Latin scene and he had an incredible vibe," says Gonzalez. "That shit is amazing to this day."

If anything, 1993 was even more spectacular than 1992, with MAW remixing and producing the likes of Björk ('Violently Happy'), Kathy Brown ('Can't Play Around'), Tia Carrere ('State of Grace' and 'I Wanna Come Home with You Tonight'), Neneh Cherry ('Buddy X'), Double Exposure ('Ten Percent'), House of Gypsies ('Sume Sigh Say'), Jack and Jill ('You Make Me Feel (Mighty Fierce)'), Soul II Soul ('Back to Life'), Ten City ('Fantasy'), Titiyo ('Back & Forth' and 'Tell Me (I'm Not Dreaming)'), Ultra Naté ('Show Me'), Joe T. Vannelli ('Play with the Voice') and Freedom Williams ('Groove Your Mind'). Yet for all of their employment, the year effectively revolved around two key releases - 'The Nervous Track' by Nu Yorican Soul on Nervous and The Album by Masters at Work on Cutting Records.

'The Nervous Track' came out of a classic MAW itch — the desire to do something different. "We came out with Nu Yorican Soul at a time when we were becoming frustrated musically," remembers Gonzalez. "I was tired of this four-on-the-floor beat and felt that nobody else was trying to change things." Searching for an alternative to clubland's regulation rhythm, the Brooklyn beats supremo turned to his now huge record collection and picked out a rare jazz sessions drummer record. "The artist was Shelly Manne and the record featured four drummers — Louis Bellson, Willie Bobo, Paul Humphrey and Shelly Manne himself," says Gonzalez, revealing his source for the first time. "It was recorded on Phillips."

Ever resourceful, Gonzalez used his street sense to dissect his favourite part of the record. "There was this track where two drummers were playing different rhythms at the same time, one out of the left speaker, the other out of the right speaker," he explains, "so I pulled one of the jacks out of the back of the mixer and recorded the side I wanted." A complementary section was lifted from another track on the album, before Gonzalez got busy with his own beat box. "I ended up adding a lot of other stuff," he says. "I just took their ideas and made my own beat out of it."

Presented with a stunningly original dance groove, Vega set to work on adding his magic to a potential classic. "Kenny's beat had hip hop elements and jazz elements and I just played a bass line groove under it," he remembers. "I also wrote these eerie sounding chords, which I played at the top of the track. They had a jazz flavour to them — the fourth progression — and I thought they worked perfectly together."

Finally there was the question of the artist title. "India and I came up with Nu Yorican Soul specially for 'The Nervous Track'," says Vega. "We had to create something that described the marriage of these different kinds of music. We were all Puerto Ricans from New York, and because we had grown up in New York we had also listened to all kinds of music, which had given us soul. So Nu Yorican Soul was perfect."

The track only sold some ten thousand copies, but it received widespread critical acclaim and became an anthem in the Sound Factory Bar. "It was huge in the club and it also crossed over into a lot of other scenes," says Vega. "The acid jazz DJs loved it and the club DJs loved it. It even influenced people in the jungle scene." Crossing genres and crossing clubbing populations, MAW had drawn on the interracial musical experiences of New York's ethnically diverse population in order to create a contemporary gem — as well as the germ for their future.

The Cutting album followed— even though the bulk of it had been recorded a couple of years earlier. Organised around two separate LPs, the first half — the raw side — revolved around a Gonzalez-inspired journey into hip hop rhythms, while the second half — the club side — focused on the house tip and included a classic dub track ('The Buff Dance'), a Jocelyn Brown number ('Can't Stop the Rhythm') and a couple of songs by India ('When You Touch Me' and 'I Can't Get No Sleep'). Once again, MAW were bringing together ostensibly different music cultures, and, once again, the philosophy proved to be compatible with a number of diverse dance floors. "To me the music was all coming together at that point," says Gonzalez. "David Morales was definitely playing both parts of the album at the Red Zone."

India's performances created the biggest stir, even though she had already worked with Vega on a number occasions. Their musical alliance had begun when the then Devil's Nest DJ introduced the young diva to Jellybean and helped her win a deal at Warner Brothers. "Her first single was called 'Dancing on the Fire' and it was the first record I ever produced," says Vega, "but Jellybean just gave me a remix credit." In 1990 Vega did a house mix on an India track called 'You Should Be Loving Me' — which was never released — and a couple of years later he co-produced her debut album, Llegó La India Via Eddie Palmieri. Yet despite the starlet's success on the Latin circuit, she was keen to make music for the clubs, and 'I Cant Get No Sleep' became the hottest track on the MAW album. "India just ad-libbed over one of our dub tracks," says Vega. "It wasn't a song, but it still made sense. She kept building and building until she went in that incredible scat at the end of the track."

But if 1993 belonged to India, then she had to share 1994 with Barbara Tucker. As it happens, the Underground Network promoter had already made an impact on the dance floor via the earlier release of Hardrive's 'Deep Inside', a Vega dub track that was released as an appetiser to the momentous 'Beautiful People'. "I wrote 'Beautiful People' with India, Lem and Barbara and when Barbara did the demo she started singing, 'Deep deep inside, deep deep down inside' in the ad-libbed vamp," says Vega. "I thought it'd be a good strategy to introduce her voice to the scene before the actual release of 'Beautiful People', so I took that little hook and it became 'Deep Inside'." The track was engineered by a diehard Louie fan called Eric 'More' Morillo, who had just set up a tiny studio, and the resulting acetate was sent straight to Strictly. Yet while Tucker was ecstatic with the outcome, Vega had his reservations. "It felt like a demo," he explains. "But Gladys loved it and the EP went on to sell thirty thousand copies on Strictly alone."

There was nothing unfinished about the final release of 'Beautiful People', a nine-minute tribute to Tucker's dance floor population which included the infectious and rightfully popular 'Deep Inside' hook as one half of a double-headed chorus. Yet if the backing vocal credits are anything to go by, 'Beautiful People' was also an inadvertent tribute to Tucker herself, delivered from an appreciative New York dance music community. India, Michael Watford, Byron Stingily, Karen Bernard, Carol Sylvan, Connie Harvey, Earl Robinson, Eddie Stockley, Kenny Bobien, Terry Wright and Pierre Salandy — all are listed, along with Tucker herself, under the title 'All Star Background Vocals'.

Michael Watford — number two to India in the Tucker chorus — had already established himself as an important vocalist within the MAW orbit when he recorded the impassioned, pounding 'My Love' in Morillo's cramped premises. Watford returned, along with co-vocalists India, Carol Sylvan and the rarely credited Biti, to work on the underground gospel explorations of 'Voices in My Mind', which eventually appeared on the fledgling Ministry of Sound label. "We were working on a remix for Freedom Williams and we had all four of them in the studio," recalls Vega, who had already recorded the track with Gonzalez. "They were all in different booths and each time I pointed to one of them they knew it was their turn to ad lib on the theme of freedom. I loved letting the artists go off like that."

Yet for all of the extraordinary tracks that were produced and remixed by MAW in 1994 — and these also included 'Listen (Just Listen)' (Urban Species on Talkin Loud), 'Hot' (Willie Ninja on Nervous), 'I Like' (Shanice on Motown), 'Hold On' (95 North featuring Sabrynaah Pope on King Street), 'Good Time' (Jazmina on Kult), 'Watchugot' (Groove Collective on Reprise), 'Nite Life' (Kim English on Nervous) and 'Curious' (Sun, Sun, Sun on Strictly Rhythm) — for all of these wonderful releases, nothing could quite rival 'Love & Happiness (Yemaya Y Ochún)' by River Ocean featuring India.

On the surface, 'Love & Happiness' was another addition to MAW's expanding tribal catalogue. Gonzalez and Vega, following the innovative examples of Craze's 'Voodoo Drums' and KC Flight's 'Voices', had already dipped their feet into this heavily rhythmic aesthetic with Tito Puente's 'Para Los Rumberos' and 'Sume Sigh Say' by the House of Gypsies, and the fact that 'Love & Happiness' had been subtitled 'The Tribal EP' indicated that they were about to serve up more of the same. About which nobody would have complained.

But the uplifting, mesmeric and multidimensional music of the River Ocean vinyl told an altogether different story — a story of identity, spirituality and multicultural negotiation. "India and I wanted to explore the Yoruba religion," says Vega. "We had just done the album with Eddie Palmieri and we took our inspiration from a track called 'Yemaya Y Ochún'. I took a couple of the rifts from there and then we decided on a prayer. My underlying idea was to put a song over tribal beats because nobody had really done that."

Gonzalez laid down the rhythm, carrying out Vega's instruction to "keep stacking the percussion", and then India went into the studio, ready to sing her heart out to Yemaya Y Ochún — the Yoruban gods of Love and Happiness. "First she sang the real prayer," remembers Vega. "Then in the vamp she gave her interpretation of the prayer. That whole section was improvised, and what she did with her voice was amazing. I'd never heard anything like the melodics she sang at the end. They sounded so beautiful with the music."Tito Puente's inspirational timbales ensued. "We already had a relationship with Tito," says Vega, and I thought that he would sound great on such a percussive song." Puente listened to a rough mix of the track and was told where he should play, but in the end Vega took just one rift and turned it into an integral and memorable part of the rhythm. "I used a millionth of what he did. I took just four bars and looped them, so they became another hook in the song."

Puente's contribution was special enough for Vega to produce a couple of rhythm tracks — 'Tito & India' and 'Conga Drums' — and these provided the DJ with an ideal way of presenting 'Love & Happiness' to his crowd at the Sound Factory Bar. "I played the bonus beats for a while and people were saying, 'Wow! These are powerful!'" explains Vega. "As soon as people were into the rhythms I introduced them to the song. They crowd reaction was instant. They were totally blown away."

The crest of River Ocean's wave came at an Underground Network gathering. The occasion was India's birthday party, and when Vega discovered that Puente was playing at the Blue Note on the same night he asked if the Latin guru would be prepared to put in a surprise late night appearance. Puente agreed, but when India took to the stage and sang a five-song set all by herself, it looked like the Sound Factory Bar would have to make do with a solo performance. Until, that is, the diva called on the effervescent percussionist to take to the stage. "The crowd went wild when Tito walked out," says Vega. "They played 'Love & Happiness' and then at the end of the song he kept playing like crazy. He was going mad, and India started singing with him. After a while nobody could take it any more. The club just blew up."

There was no let up in 1995. Donna Summer asked for Gonzalez and Vega to remix the seventies classic 'I Feel Love'. 'Close to You' by the Brand New Heavies inspired the duo to write one of their best ever dance grooves — the maw mood dub. Vega continued an already productive relationship with Morillo when the two of them released 'Reach' (Lil' Mo' Yin Yang) and 'Carnival 95 (Pride)' (Club Ultimate). Another extraordinary joint collaboration was hatched when the Sound Factory Bar DJ phoned Chicago house producer Lil' Louis at 3-a.m. and the two of them went into the studio to record 'Freaky' by the adroitly named Lou . Barbara Tucker continued where she had left off with the impassioned 'Stay Together'. On the world tip, MAW remixed Baaba Maal's 'Gorel' and 'Après La Pluie' by Les Negresses Vertes. The Ministry of Sound invited the two DJs to hook up four turntables and record Sessions 5. And 'Mondo Grosso' by Souffles H was immediately touted as the underground jazz anthem of the year.

Yet for all of the work that was coming their way, Gonzalez and Vega felt that they weren't releasing enough music. "Our discography must come to at least three thousand five hundred records," says Gonzalez, "and out of that total probably two thousand have come out. In the end we just decided to form our own label." MAW Record's debut release was 'Moonshine', an explosive Kenlou rift that revolves around a couple of jazz-inflected samples drawn from 'Home Is Where the Hatred Is', and within a matter of months the dance world had been treated to the hypnotic beats and disco bleeps of 'The Bounce' as well as the driving rhythms of 'What a Sensation'. To cap it all, the label also established itself as a forum for breaking new artists when 'Everybody Be Somebody' by Ruffneck featuring Yavahn became one of the hottest dance records of the year.

Nothing, though, was as big as 'The Bomb! (These Sounds Fall Into My Mind)', a Kenny Dope production that appeared under his Bucketheads alias and was released on Johnny 'D' DeMairo's Henry Street Music. "Since the beginning of MAW we've both had separate recording careers and I wanted to do something raw, something that was fun," says Gonzalez. "One night I was driving from Manhattan to Brooklyn with Johnny 'D' and we were listening to all of these terrible records. I said, 'Fuck that! I'm going to make to make some music!'" Gonzalez went home, pulled out a series of classics and produced "a whole album in three days."

The ensuing twelve-inch turned out to be a bit of a sleeper, in part because 'I Wanna Know' was released as the A-side. "That's the track that everybody was playing in New York," says Gonzalez. "But for some crazy reason, the Europeans were loving the B-side." Not crazy at all. 'The Bomb! (These Sounds Fall Into My Mind)' is an incredible track — driving drums and a screeching sound effect build to a crescendo and then wittily break into an extended sample from Chicago's melodic 'Street Player' — and before long it was shooting up the charts in several countries.

"That shit sold so fast it was unbelievable. We were like, "Yowww! We got a problem! Sample clearance!" For which Gonzalez blames the European Trainspotting Association. "Everybody was saying, 'He sampled Chicago!' The press didn't realise it but they were destroying me! They were like putting handcuffs on me and saying, 'Take him!'" Chicago didn't mind, but then they hadn't written the record. "The shit ended up costing me thirty thousand dollars," says Gonzalez. "And that's a lot for dance. There was a lot of drama behind that record! But it was a good turning point." And a fitting climax to an extraordinary first five years…

Tim Lawrence

(Tim Lawrence is writing Love Saves The Day: A History of American Dance Music)